I had originally planned on penning a blog post about how easy it is to setup and deploy a Grav site with ServerPilot with DigitalOcean. While that is a fantastic VPS service, someone on Gitter asked me about setting up Grav on Amazon's AWS, so I checked it out. What I found was pretty amazing. Even the free tier of the EC2 t2.micro package runs Grav like a boss! Combine this with awesome automated setup and server management via ServerPilot, and you have the makings of an unbeatable combination. In this blog post I'll go through step-by-step on how to get this setup on your own. The hardest part is setting up EC2 as it's a bit ungainly, but other than that it's a doddle, and more importantly, it's free!

Grav 1.0 has been released! This major milestone in Grav’s ongoing story and comes after a year and a half of open development, extensive user testing including over 51,000 downloads, and overwhelmingly positive feedback by our growing community.

Grav started out as a passion-project with the goal of creating a flat-file CMS that was open source, fast, and exceedingly simple. We wanted to create something that could be configured and optimized to meet virtually any situation from simple one-page sites to complex multi-language blogs.

During the past year, Grav has grown from a simple, small project to a leading choice for Web developers seeking a flat-file CMS. Its plugins library now features 85 free plugins that expand on Grav’s core functionality, enabling it to do extraordinary things. Currently 40 free themes can be downloaded and installed in an instant, absolutely free!

Download Grav 1.0

And, Grav is just getting started...

Over the past weekend, the Grav project surpassed 3,000 stars on GitHub! This is a huge achievement for the Grav team, serving as a testament of the incredible community that has grown over the past year around a new open source flat-file CMS.

Grav is still a very young content management system...

In the past few releases of Grav we have implemented Nonces (Numbers used only once) to secure forms and actions against CSRF attacks. We missed a few actions, and have adjusted our Nonce generation mechanism to be more performant.

However, the downside of this development is that it has caused some issues with some areas of the Admin to stop functioning until fixed. One of these actions that was missed previously was the Update buttons. This of course has caused a problem for upgrading Grav. But, not to fear, there is a simple solution!

After being in beta for just over a year, with nearly 50 releases and 250 closed issues, Grav is now a full featured CMS with all our roadmap tasks completed. We really could of put the Version 1.0 rubber stamp on Grav some time ago, but we decided to hold off until we had the admin plugin stable also. With an extensive beta development phase of it's own, the Grav admin has undergone a series of solid releases to add new functionality and address bugs. It is also on the cusp of getting a stable version number as we have 161 closed issues and no critical bugs currently open.

I know this is the news that a huge majority of Grav users have been waiting for. Yes, you read correctly, the Standard Admin plugin that has been so-long promised, is available for beta testing!

This is an HTML user interface that provides a convenient way to configure Grav and easily create and modify pages. This will remain a totally optional plugin, and is not in any way required or needed to use Grav effectively. In fact, the admin provides an intentionally limited view to ensure it remains easy to use and not overwhelming. I'm sure power users will still prefer to work with the configuration files directly.

Today I'm really proud to announce the release of Grav 0.9.30 which has a huge new feature: Full Multi-Language Support. This is one of the top requested features for Grav and with the help of the Grav community to isolate possible approaches, Grav now has a very powerful tool-set to build multi-language sites. The great news is that we were able to implement this capability without impacting performance!

Another key feature of this release that was required for multi-language to work properly, is the ability to configure multiple routes for a page, support a default override, and even provide a canonical route to be used for SEO purposes.

In case you have not been following the updates in the Plugins page, or our Twitter feed, I thought I would take this opportunity to showcase a few of cool plugins that have been added recently. We'll cover Embed, CacheBuster, MediaEmbed, and Private.

In some of my earlier blog posts, I outlined the process of setting up a local development environment which involves installing and configuring up a web-server with PHP. This process can become second nature, and is the preferred approach for many developers, but utilizing a web-based IDE is a new option that has many surprising benefits.

Web IDEs have been around for a few years, but only recently with the improvement in browser capabilities, more sophisticated editor capabilities, and the integration of virtual machines, have them become a viable option. For years I watched from afar, and scoffed at being able to do any real development in such an environment, but after a recent round of testing, I have come away impressed!

Read on to find out the many benefits and a walk-through of getting a powerful Grav development environment setup for free!